Expat wanderer

One of the first things that happened when I came back to Doha was my friends took me to breakfast at the Beirut. When they invited me, I was puzzled. The Beirut, as I remember it, was a place on Shara Kharaba (Electricity Street) where you drove up and guys in baseball caps came to your car and your ordered and they brought the food.

My friends are conservative, and fully covered, abaya and niqab. I could not imagine them sitting in an all-men kind of place.

But no, they took me to the NEW Beirut, down in the Souq al Waqif, and oh, what a treat! Everything, all the good foods they always had at the Beirut, only now you could sit at a table and eat! There is a family area upstairs (with a very nice restroom, by the way) and downstairs all the bachelors eat (meaning any male without a female with him) and then there is outside seating which is great when you are meeting up with western friends.

Today I was meeting up with one of my very best friends, a souk buddy, who enjoys just roaming and experiencing as I do. Actually, she had an agenda, and that will be the next blog entry, but we have been friends for a long time. Partners in crime. We egg each other on.

Most of the time we would order felafel (little balls of cooked ground chickpeas – garbanzos – and parsley, deep fried – sort of like hush puppies) and fool – beans, and hummous, with oil or yoghurt or meat. I would see guys eating bowls of stuff, though, like cereal bowls, only it wasn’t cereal, it looked maybe like oatmeal. We asked what it was, and they said it is like breakfast chickpeas and hummos with fried bread – fattoush – with yoghurt over it. So it sort of is like oatmeal, only it isn’t oatmeal. It is called Fatta.

Oh. My. Friends.

All my years in this part of the world, and I didn’t know about Fatta. Instead of forcing myself to eat oatmeal, I could have been eating Fatta.

This is SO delicious. So delicious that I beg you, if it is horrifyingly fattening, please don’t tell me. It has beans, and the fried flatbread, and toasted pine nuts, and slivered almonds, all covered with a coat of yoghurt and a drizzle of really tasty olive oil. It is so unbelievably delicious; if it were equivalent of oatmeal, this is what I would eat every day for breakfast for the rest of my life, it is so good.

But I have the bad feeling that anything so delicious is probably not so good for me. I have the feeling that it is called Fatta because it will make me big and fatta if I continue to eat it and enjoy it as I did today. Oh YUMMMMMMM.

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